reaction

Session with Peter

I was confused after my getting tutored by Peter. I was using a really informal style in the draft I brought him, and I was still struggling with whether or not I used enough analysis. I told him these were the things I wanted to talk about, he read my paper (the whole thing, to himself) and then we started to talk about my problems. He kept saying things like "It works well the way you do it, but you might want to try doing it this way..." and "it all really depends on what effect you want your paper to have." He would go on to explain the benefits of his suggestions, and I would interject by saying I had thought that my draft did achieve those benefits, and he would say "well yeah, but it might work to do this too. It all depends on where you want to go with it." I left feeling frustrated and confused. I felt like he was trying to tell me that my way was bad, and then trying to tell me how to make it good, but holding back the whole time and thus sending me mixed messages. It wasn't until a few hours later that I realized Peter was a living example of the ideas presented in both Welch and Daiker. He was telling me the good things about my paper and saying that it works well how it is--which, if nothing else, keeps me confident that I have produced something good--and then leaving the ball in my court, leaving all of the authority in my hands, and making sure I know that his suggestions are merely suggestions and I can do whatever I want. Converse to most of the situations in Welch, I do not really feel that frustrated with the class having too much authority over my writing so I didn't really need a non authoritative tutor, but Peter's abilities in presenting non-authoritative comments did help me take his suggestions to heart--he let me know that I don't have to do it his way, but it might be a good thing to try. So I went home and tried it. I decided I would give it a chance, and if it didn't work I would be able to go back to doing it my way. His suggestions ended up working really well. I'm glad he gave me the approach he did. If he told me flat out that my way didn't work and it needed to be changed, I probably would have gone home and changed it, but not have been nearly as confident a) that my paper was good and b) that I'm changing it because I want to and not because and authortative figure told me to. I try to keep the student in authority when I'm tutoring and I try to praise the student, but I think these are things that we often forget and sometimes seem not that important. But they are important and I think we should keep them in mind. Praise is the one thing I think I could have done a better job on with the girl I wrote my last blog about--so it is something that I am definitely going to try to focus on.